Erin Brockovich's Next Crusade: Putting Consumers in Charge of Their Tap Water

December 10, 2018

By Christian Smith

Clean water advocate and movie heroine Erin Brockovich is raising red flags over the state of the nation's water supply. She told Cheddar that it's time for the public to take notice of a problem they've largely been ignoring.

"The issue has always been there ー we just either haven't talked about it or it hasn't been exposed," Brockovich said. "We have 18 million miles of lead pipes we're going to have to replace; we're going to have to look at our water infrastructure, we're going to have to look at our municipalities."

The activist, whose life was immortalized in an eponymous film starring Julia Roberts in 2000, cited a whole system of failures that have damaged America's water ー most notably, the ongoing Flint Water Crisis, in which dangerous levels of lead were detected in the Michigan city's water supply. In Brockovich's view, the Environmental Protection Agency is understaffed and underfunded, creating a cascade of mismanaged utilities.

In an effort to give consumers more control over purifying their own water, Brockovich is endorsing a water filtration product for the first time in her storied career. She is partnering with AquaTru, which makes a countertop reverse osmosis water purification system.

Reverse osmosis is the same purification process that most major bottling companies use to filter their water bottles. It removes dozens of contaminants using a variety of filtering materials such as a carbon and even coconut shells.

Whether or not consumers buy a reverse osmosis filtration system, Brockovich wants everyone to educate themselves about the water running from their taps.